"Most kitchen scraps can feed pets and worm farms. Banana skins and tea leaves make special foods for pot-plants, camellias, roses and hostas. Cordon-bleu cooks make exquisite sauces and soups from bones and scraps."

Sorry Val, this is completely unrealistic. We're not all pottering around with our cats in our inner city terrace with nothing better to do than sort our rubbish. Some of us have kids to feed and clean up after. Plastic bags are an important convenience. Mandatory worm farms is just crazy talk.

Besides, the Productivity Commission has already demolished the extreme ant-bag arguments. They are just not that big of a problem.

That said, I wish Coles would give me the option of using stiff paper bags. They were always superior for carrying your shopping in anyway.

Posted by grn, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 12:00:59 PM

Funny thing, being in my sixties, I can remember wrapping all moist rubbish in newspaper. It was then placed in a newspaper lined garbage tin. This worked very well. I suspect that rubbish disposed of in this way would break down quicker after it was dumped.

Posted by Flo, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 3:19:12 PM

grn,

too funny!:-)

I just wrote a whole post on that in the general discussion.

Posted by Usual Suspect, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 4:13:42 PM

I dutifully put my rubbish out once a week. Rubbish may well include plastic bags surplus to my requirements. As soon as the rubbish is on the kerb awaiting collection I have no more interest in it. The rubbish is now the property of the Council. It is up to the Council to dispose it in any way they think proper.

Rubbish disposal is one of the services provided by council with my rate money. How the council do the job, that I pay them to perform, is their business. I would have a legitimate complaint only if the council failed to collect, or a careless council worker littered the street.

None-the-less, I can not but laugh at the embarrassment of Peter Garrett, as yet one more crazy impractical green idea went down the plug hole.

Posted by anti-green, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 4:27:36 PM

Grn and others, really, listen to what you're saying. The inconvenience of spending 7 seconds to sort your rubbish or, (startling thought) find an alternative to the one - yes only one - type of plastic being proposed for a ban, is too much. And reference to the Productivity Commission is misplaced - they didn't demolish the argument against plastic bags, they simply demonstrated that as extreme economic rationalists they cannot even understand the argument that reducing waste is actually good. Under their demented accounting systems, resource effiency is not an economic (or any other) benefit. Not a high quality source of information. Plastic bags is not the most pressing of environmental problems - but if Garrett et al can't solve this one, with broad public support and absolutely trivial costs, I fear they won't be able to solve much of anything.

Posted by next, Wednesday, 30 April 2008 6:00:47 PM

In 50 years of ocean diving including full-time research since 1982 into world fish stock depletion and consequences and solutions I have never seen any animal dead in the wild due to any plastic bag. I have seen environment activist photographs of half a dozen animals claimed to have died due to plastic bags. There is no data or photographic evidence to prove plastic bags are killing marine life as claimed.

In contrast to politics of plastic bag rubbish including that even promoted by government, unprecedented mortality of marine animals and malnutrition amongst island people is occurring due to starvation. The starvation and islander malnutrition is linked to sewage nutrient pollution that is feeding algae and epiphyte growth that is smothering estuary and bay seagrass food web nursery.

Fish stock and food web devastation and the real state of the marine environment is being gagged by major media and government while damaging development is allowed to continue.

Claims about stopping plastic bag use and marketing of alternative imported 'green' bags is tantamount to extortion.